Ethan Frome is a novel defined by its setting, with Wharton devoting numerous passages to descriptions of the physical landscape. She also frequently uses a combination of imagery, metaphor, and simile to draw comparisons between characters and their environment. The motif of animals and nature emphasizes the profound impact that environmental factors can have on human emotion and behavior.
In Chapter 1, Wharton sets up Ethan as a person who "more sensitive than the people about him" to the beauty of the natural world. He is also appreciative of Mattie's beauty, and Wharton links these two concepts together by using figurative language to compare Mattie to different aspects of nature. At different points throughout the novel, parts of Mattie's body are likened to a sunset, a field of wheat, and a cloud of mist.
Wharton also frequently compares Mattie to a bird—a delicate creature associated with song, morning, and springtime. Her mind is likened to "the flit of a bird in the branches," and the movement of her hands resembles the flight of birds over a nest. At one point, Ethan is reminded of her laughter when he hears a bird singing. This focus on sound and movement reflects how Mattie, unlike Zeena, is vibrant and physically dynamic. Songbirds are also often used to symbolize devotion, monogamy, and domesticity because they nest in pairs and were historically believed to mate for life. This symbolism is fitting because although Ethan definitely feels romantic and sexual desire for Mattie, what he truly wants is for them to live together as man and wife in idealized domestic bliss.
In Chapter 9, Wharton uses tactile and olfactory imagery to deepen the connection between Mattie and the beauty of the natural world and associate her with warmth and light:
She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.
Later on in the same chapter, following the fatal accident, this motif continues, with Ethan mistaking Mattie for a small injured animal:
The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt.
Earlier in the novel, when Mattie was likened to a bird, these comparisons had a positive connotation. Here, however, Wharton's use of auditory imagery in the phrase "frightened cheep" emphasizes Mattie's helplessness in the face of external circumstances. After the accident, she loses the characteristics—beauty and movement—that connected her to the natural world.
More than 20 years after the accident, Ethan still has a deep connection to the environment, but the nature of this connection has changed. In the Prologue, the Narrator makes note of this connection:
He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.
Ethan has become like a Starkfield winter—harsh and cold on the outside, with any remaining warmth locked deep within himself.
Throughout Ethan Frome, sound is a motif that emphasizes the loneliness of the novel’s setting and the emotional anguish of its characters.
At several points throughout the novel, Wharton associates the lack of sound with isolation and insanity. After Ethan’s father dies, his mother’s health rapidly declines, and one symptom of her illness is pathological silence. The novel proposes several potential explanations for this silence, including grief, the diminished traffic on the road to the Frome farmhouse as a result of the new railroad, and the maddening effect of “too many winters” spent in Starkfield.
In Chapter 4, Ethan recalls that the silence was finally broken when Zeena arrived at the farmhouse to help nurse his mother:
[H]uman speech was again heard in the house. After the mortal silence of his long imprisonment Zeena’s volubility was like music to his ears.
The simile comparing Zeena’s voice to music emphasizes the emotionally nourishing quality of human speech. The lack of sound, by contrast, can provoke restless behavior: Ethan does not love Zeena, but he asks her to marry him because he fears that if he is left alone without anyone to speak to, he will go insane. As the years go by, however, Zeena also grows increasingly sickly and quiet. When Mattie arrives in Starkfield many years later, Ethan is attracted not only to her physical beauty but also to the sound of her voice and laughter, which breathe life into his stagnant existence.
Later in Chapter 4, Wharton suggests that the mere presence of human voices is not enough to stave off melancholy, because true companionship means having someone to listen as well as speak. Zeena’s growing taciturnity, for instance, seems to be a result of Ethan’s lack of interest in her:
Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan "never listened." The charge was not wholly unfounded.
As a married woman in turn-of-the-century New England, Zeena was expected to remain within the domestic sphere, which, in a rural community like Starkfield, resulted in almost total confinement. Her isolation and lack of mobility are exacerbated by the fact that her husband, her only companion, fails to actively listen to what she has to say. Ethan suspects and Wharton strongly implies that her silence is an act of revenge—Zeena cannot exercise much power over Ethan, but she can deny him the companionship that has been denied to her.
By the end of the novel, Ethan has two companions at the farmhouse, but their voices only serve to aggravate him and remind him of his failure to escape his oppressive life in Starkfield. As a result, when the Narrator first encounters Ethan 20 years after his fateful accident, he too has grown silent.
Ethan Frome is a novel defined by its setting, with Wharton devoting numerous passages to descriptions of the physical landscape. She also frequently uses a combination of imagery, metaphor, and simile to draw comparisons between characters and their environment. The motif of animals and nature emphasizes the profound impact that environmental factors can have on human emotion and behavior.
In Chapter 1, Wharton sets up Ethan as a person who "more sensitive than the people about him" to the beauty of the natural world. He is also appreciative of Mattie's beauty, and Wharton links these two concepts together by using figurative language to compare Mattie to different aspects of nature. At different points throughout the novel, parts of Mattie's body are likened to a sunset, a field of wheat, and a cloud of mist.
Wharton also frequently compares Mattie to a bird—a delicate creature associated with song, morning, and springtime. Her mind is likened to "the flit of a bird in the branches," and the movement of her hands resembles the flight of birds over a nest. At one point, Ethan is reminded of her laughter when he hears a bird singing. This focus on sound and movement reflects how Mattie, unlike Zeena, is vibrant and physically dynamic. Songbirds are also often used to symbolize devotion, monogamy, and domesticity because they nest in pairs and were historically believed to mate for life. This symbolism is fitting because although Ethan definitely feels romantic and sexual desire for Mattie, what he truly wants is for them to live together as man and wife in idealized domestic bliss.
In Chapter 9, Wharton uses tactile and olfactory imagery to deepen the connection between Mattie and the beauty of the natural world and associate her with warmth and light:
She clung to him without answering, and he laid his lips on her hair, which was soft yet springy, like certain mosses on warm slopes, and had the faint woody fragrance of fresh sawdust in the sun.
Later on in the same chapter, following the fatal accident, this motif continues, with Ethan mistaking Mattie for a small injured animal:
The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt.
Earlier in the novel, when Mattie was likened to a bird, these comparisons had a positive connotation. Here, however, Wharton's use of auditory imagery in the phrase "frightened cheep" emphasizes Mattie's helplessness in the face of external circumstances. After the accident, she loses the characteristics—beauty and movement—that connected her to the natural world.
More than 20 years after the accident, Ethan still has a deep connection to the environment, but the nature of this connection has changed. In the Prologue, the Narrator makes note of this connection:
He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.
Ethan has become like a Starkfield winter—harsh and cold on the outside, with any remaining warmth locked deep within himself.
